Financial management systems are valuable tools that provide services that were previously available only through interaction with a human professional, or that were painfully attempted by oneself. Prior to the advent of financial management systems, a user (e.g., a small business owner) would be required to consult with an accountant or bookkeeper for services, and the user would be limited, and potentially inconvenienced, by the office hours during which the professional was available for consultation. Furthermore, the user might be required to gather paper copies of all relevant records and travel to the professional's physical location to relay the information to the professional to obtain the professional's assistance. Beyond the inconveniences of scheduling and travel, the user would also be at the mercy of the professional's education, skill, personality, and varying moods. All of these factors resulted in a user who was vulnerable to: human error, variations in human ability, and variations in human temperament.
A financial management system can provide benefits that human professionals are hard-pressed to provide, such as: not having limited working hours, not being geographically limited, and not being subject to human error or variations in human ability or temperament. Small business owners are typically not accountants, nor do they want to be. Small business owners typically interact with business management software out of necessity, while simply wanting to return to the task of running their business. A financial management system enables users to receive accountant-like services, without the pain points associated with traditional interaction with professionals. To provide these services, however, the financial management system can often present information, options, and/or terms to users that may result in the users having questions about their interactions with the financial management system.
Users who have unanswered questions often feel fear, uncertainty, and/or doubt about what they are doing or about what they are supposed to do. The users' feelings of fear, uncertainty, and/or doubt are further exacerbated when answers are difficult to find, when answers are deeply embedded into large amounts of other information (e.g., in a webpage), and/or when the answers are difficult to understand (e.g. written in accountant jargon). Feelings of fear, uncertainty, and/or doubt are inconsistent with satisfied/happy customers, and such feelings may cause customers to seek alternative solutions, ultimately resulting in the abandonment of use of the financial management system. Because financial management systems are adept at saving users time while providing feature-rich business management solutions, answering users' questions in a quick, easy to find, and easy to understand manner is beneficial for both the users and the service provider of the financial management system.
What is needed is a method and system for resolving the longstanding deficiencies in resolving users' questions in financial management systems, by providing domain-specific incremental search results with a customer self-service system for a financial management system, according to one embodiment.